A 5000-year-old language and civilization struggles to survive. From the The Hindu:
Alleging that the “mullah-military alliance” in Pakistan is the main cause of the human rights situation in the country, the sixth annual World Sindhi conference has urged the Pakistan government to respect the rights and stop discrimination against Sindhis there.
Participants, who had come from Canada, Europe, Sindh and various parts of the United States, urged members of the US senate and the Congress, and the State Department to consider the human rights situation in Pakistan while dealing with Pakistan’s military leadership.
“Pakistan’s military itself has become a state within a state and a huge human rights crushing machine,” they said.
“We are not separatists, however Islamabad must decide whether they want to keep us with justice and dignity or force us away by continuing to appropriate our natural resources, our water, our culture and language,” speakers at the conference stressed.
The debasement of Sindhi culture and the blatant revision of their history continues with full support from the Pakistani government.
The participants, particularly, Humaira Rahman, director of WSI’s Canada Chapter, and Munawar Laghari, the executive director of World Sindhi Institute in Washington DC, focused on how the public education system had been used by the bureaucracy to systematically downgrade the use of Sindhi as a medium of instruction, while at the same time distorting the authentic history of Sindh and introducing fundamentalism and intolerance in the text books and curricula.
They also pointed out how the control of content of syllabi had created a culture of hate and glorification of Jihad in Pakistani public schools.